Please join us to celebrate the launch of Coco Island by Christine Roseeta Walker. The reading will be hosted by Rachel Mann. The event will feature readings and discussion, and audience members will have the opportunity to ask their own questions. We will show the text during readings so that you can read along.

Registration for this online event will cost £2, redeemable against the cost of the book. You will receive the discount code and instructions for how to purchase the book in your confirmation email as well as during and after the event.

Register here and let us know you can make it by joining and sharing the Facebook listing.

Christine Roseeta Walker’s first book is set entirely in Negril, Jamaica. Coco Island presents a compelling cycle of poems, attentive to the undertow and hidden forces that shape a place and its people. In narrative poems, in songs, in fables, in comic scenes, ghost stories and vivid character sketches – especially of girls and women – Walker artfully lays bare how economic necessity, religious belief, illness and addiction reach far into the structures of family life and community. Piecing together the isolated lives of those left behind as the island modernises, her fearless, memorable poems chart the devastation of a world.

About the speakers:

Christine Roseeta Walker is a Jamaican poet and novelist living on the outskirts of Manchester, England. She studied Creative Writing at the University of Salford and the University of Manchester. Her debut novel, The Grass is Weeping, is a revenge tragedy set in Jamaica. She also works as a commissioned poet with an archaeologist working in the Peak District, and she spends her time writing and organising poetry reading workshops in care homes for people living with dementia.

Rachel Mann is a priest, writer and broadcaster. She is the author of thirteen books, including her debut poetry collection, A Kingdom of Love (Carcanet, 2019), and the acclaimed non-fiction, Fierce Imaginings: The Great War, Ritual, Memory, and God (DLT, 2017). She is a Visiting Teaching Fellow at The Manchester Writing School, and broadcasts regularly, including as a contributor to Thought For The Day. Her second collection, Eleanor Among the Saints, is published by Carcanet in January 2024.